Juniors’ Ring

taking a step back when Pomeroy wasn’t getting the correct response to her cues.

“Make sure when you ask her things that you really pay attention to if she’s answering,” said Schut-Kery. “Dressage riders—it’s our nature to control everything. Sometimes it helps to break it down and say, ‘Wait a minute. I have been repeating this 20 times and she always answers for one second but then she’s gone,’ so the answer isn’t really honest enough.”

If you are repeatedly asking your horse for something and not getting the correct response, Schut-Kery said it’s okay sometimes to stop and walk to re-approach the problem with a fresh mind.

“Dressage is complex,” she said. “There’s the technical aspect, but then you are working with two living beings and that has to all be incorporated in how you give your aids. You not only ride just technical movements, but ride the interior of the horse, too, and what her issues are physically and mentally.”

6. Ride both sides of the horse.

Olivia Martz is currently working up to flying changes with her horse, Norra. Schut-Kery equipped her with some tools to keep Norra supple and responsive on both sides, a necessary quality before clean changes can happen.

“She gets in one position and stays there and is a little bit stiff,” Schut-Kery observed during a leg-yield exercise, adding that it’s important to ride not just the yielding aids but the receiving aids as well. “Remember how she tipped her nose to the right when you were yielding off the left leg? That means as you yield, you have to keep riding the right side of her body.

“If you are in a left-lead canter and then you want to change right and she’s a little tight on the right side, that change won’t happen. You want to be able to have both sides of the horse’s body supple, regardless of what stride or canter lead she’s on. So those little yields help to get an idea for that.”

7. Stretch through the back.

Lexie Kment’s horse, Montagny Von Der Heide, was just coming back from some time off before the clinic, and SchutKery helped guide a warm-up that would keep him working comfortably as he builds back strength.

“In the canter, in the warm-up, lower his neck just a little bit so it’s not so tight and so that you can position his neck differently and he’s not just in one position,” said Schut-Kery. “Also so that he reaches a little bit more to the hand, especially at the beginning. He’s had a little bit of time off and it’s only your fourth ride back on him, so you relax his back. When we talk about making him stretch, it’s not always meant to be like in first level where you stretch them all the way down, but you have a few inches of stretch available to you if you want it.

“Keep the neck in that place where he’s over the back,” she added. “The base of the neck in front of the withers [should be] low to the point where his back can really come up and act as a bridge between hind and front.”

8. Give a little. Schut-Kery often advocated for the riders to give a little with their hands after working on a particular skill for a while to see how the horses responded and to find out if they would be able to carry themselves.

“It’s all about reading and understanding your horse and getting the feedback from the horse in order to make an appropriate decision on what we need to do,” she said to Kment as they worked through an exercise at the walk with Montagny Von Der Heide. “Where are the holes? How can we help him? You have to give a little bit.”

9. Focus on the individual aid.

Early in Evie Olivier’s ride with clinician George Williams on the second day of the clinic, her horse, Shiloh, was not responsive to her right-lead canter cues. Rather than pile on stronger aids, Williams had her cue Shiloh to trot using just her inside leg to get her tuned in to that aid.

“Sometimes you need to zero in on the leg or the aid that she’s behind and just try to get her in front of that aid,” said Williams. “I don’t want it to take all of the aids to canter. She should be able to canter from your inside leg, or a little bit from your seat, or a little bit from your outside leg, but any one of them individually in a way that you don’t always have to have all the aids so strong. Ideally, we’d have her canter from your inside seat bone, and then we could keep her quite straight. But second to that is that she has to be in front of the inside leg so that you can keep her straight. If it takes a lot of outside leg, you run a high risk of pushing the haunches to the inside.”

10. Always praise your horse.

In Dover’s initial lecture, he reminded the participants that the rewards of a good ride weren’t as inherent to the horses as it is to the riders.

“For a horse, doing all of these amazing things that they do for us, there’s not a huge pot of gold at the end of that rainbow for them,” Dover said. “I watch it and I think it’s beautiful. It’s also a little weird that we’re prancing around and making them do this stuff. If they were different, they would just buck us off and come back around and stomp us into the ground. But they’re such wonderful, beautiful animals that they do this stuff for us. We have to remember that with each half-halt, with each correction, the reward should be twice what the correction was.”

Watch the full replay of the 2022 Robert Dover Horsemastership Clinic Week on USEF Network.

Robert Dover started the week with his lecture on dressage theory.

Excitement is growing for the Paso Fino world’s 2022 Youth Mundial, as riders aged four to 24 from all over the United States practice for this spring’s U.S. Team tryouts and a chance to represent the United States at the prestigious biennial international competition this summer in Cali, Colombia.

Youth Mundial is an equitation competition produced by the Confepaso organization, which represents nine nations: Aruba, Colombia, Curaçao, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, Puerto Rico, the U.S., and Venezuela. The organization promotes the Paso breeds, including Paso Fino, Trote y Galope, Trocha, and Trocha y Galope. Riders are judged on their horsemanship skills, equitation, and ability to showcase their horses’ talent.

The Mundial presents some unique challenges for the young equestrian. As international travel for horses is often cost-prohibitive, the rules for the event note that the host nation must provide a bank of donated horses. If you do not have a horse and aren’t able to rent a horse, fly your horse to Colombia, or purchase a horse there, then you are eligible to compete on a donated horse. Donated horses are assigned to riders through a lottery system. The rider is not able to practice or bond with that horse. Riders train intensively, often with multiple horses, so they can perform on any horse.

The Paso Fino Horse Association, a US Equestrian affiliate organization, is extremely proud to support the U.S. team. “The future of our breed is the youth; we need to support them,” said PFHA Vice-President Sofia Passariello. PFHA hosted a similar international competition for adults, the Mundial Confepaso, in Miami last fall. The profits from that event allowed PFHA to dedicate $25,000 to the Youth Mundial program and an additional $25,000 to their youth program overall, a meaningful show of support that competitors appreciate.